Abstract

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident hospitalizations, incident cases, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at national, state, and county levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages.

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Recommended citation: Cramer, E.Y., Huang, Y., Wang, Y., Ray, E.L., Cornell, M., Bracher, J., Brennen, A., Castero Rivadeneira, A.J., Gerding, A., House, K., Jayawardena, D., Kanji, A.H., Khandelwal, A., Le, K., Niemi, J., Stark, A., Shah, A., Wattanchit, N., Zorn, M.W., & Reich, N.G., on behalf of the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub Consortium (2021). "The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset". medRxiv: 2021.11.04.21265886v1.